Daddy

An older gay man who is attractive because of his age: confident, experienced, often a bit commanding or protective.

A daddy is an older gay man, usually somewhere from his late thirties on, who is attractive precisely because of his age: the gray in the beard, the confidence, the sense that he has done this before and knows what he wants. Daddy is less a body type than an attitude. A daddy can be a bear, a jock, a slim silver fox or a guy in a suit; what makes him a daddy is that he takes charge, looks after you, or both.

What a daddy is not: necessarily rich (that is a sugar daddy), necessarily a top, or anybody's actual father. The word is affectionate, flirtatious and very often a compliment. Calling a man "daddy" in a comment under his photo means you find him hot; calling him daddy in bed is a whole other game, and one that a lot of men, of every age, enjoy playing.

Where it comes from

"Daddy" for a lover is old. Green's Dictionary of Slang finds the sense of an older man who pays for the wants of a younger lover, woman or man, in an American song title from 1918, the root of today's sugar daddy. The gay sense, an older gay man or a masculine one, is recorded in 1928 in Claude McKay's Harlem novel Home to Harlem. Later, American prison slang used "daddy" for the dominant, penetrating partner in a couple of men, a usage Green's dates to 1969.

So the word has always mixed three ideas: age, protection and dominance. Different corners of the gay world have leaned on different ones. The leather scene gave us the leather daddy, the experienced man in boots and harness who mentors the younger ones. The bear scene has the daddy bear, often paired with a cub. And the apps and porn have made "daddy" one of their staple words.

How it is used today

Today "daddy" is a tribe on the apps, a porn category and, increasingly, a word the whole internet uses for any man who is attractive in a confident, grown-up way. The gay meaning came first, but the rest of the world has caught on, and you will now see straight women leaving "daddy" under photos of middle-aged actors.

Inside the gay world, the classic pairings are the daddy and the twink, the daddy and his boy, and the daddy and the pup in the kink scene. "Boy" in these pairings means a younger adult man in the junior role, never an actual child, and the roles are about the dynamic more than the dates on the passports: plenty of daddies are only five years older than their boys, and some boys are fifty.

In porn, daddy porn sells the same fantasy, older men with younger adult performers, and it is one of the steadiest genres there is.

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